A useful history of a war little studied on this side of the border.
Thorough account of the cynical, opportune US war against Mexico.
Former AP reporter Wheelan (Jefferson’s War, 2003, etc.) writes with vivid immediacy of desperate battles on desert sands and tropical beaches, but the best parts here take place in well-appointed Washington offices. As Wheelan notes, the war was precipitated by border skirmishes, particularly an attack by Mexican cavalry on a US army unit in April 1846 that, President James K. Polk insisted, took place on American soil inasmuch as Texas had recently been persuaded to join the Union. Whether the Mexicans actually forded the Rio Grande is unclear, but, by Wheelan’s account, what is certain is that Polk had been spoiling for a war of conquest “to divest Mexico of California and the New Mexico territory” in order to fulfill Jeffersonian notions of manifest destiny. Congress willingly budgeted $10 million and 50,000 soldiers for the task, silencing members who had protested—the nucleus, Wheelan notes, of the first major antiwar movement in the country’s history. Mexico’s government was weak and crumbling, so Polk had an easy enough sitting-duck target; thus, he rejected entreaties for peace by which Mexico would have ceded most of the desired territory for a mere $30 million if Santa Anna were allowed to return from exile to power and given a fund by which to bribe any Mexican legislators who opposed the deal. Instead, Polk unleashed a war most of whose American participants came to feel was unjust from the very start, and that, most historians of the period agree, set the American Civil War in motion: As Ulysses S. Grant, who distinguished himself at Chapultepec, said of the conflict, “Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. . . . We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.”
A useful history of a war little studied on this side of the border.Pub Date: April 10, 2007
ISBN: 0-7867-1719-X
Page Count: 512
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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